Forbes Magazine listed Houston as #1 in the nation for manufacturing growth in May 2013. What has caused this growth? Cheap energy. Not oil. This time it’s natural gas which has been on an upward surge in production with the advent of “fracking” or hydraulic fracturing of shale fields. 
More natural gas reserves bring down electricity costs and increases both foreign and domestic investment for more manufacturing space in the U.S. It also attracts new companies to the area. Add to this the rising wages overseas where jobs have been outsourced for the past few years and it becomes a perfect storm of pent up manufacturing needs.
How can inbound marketing help you put your B2B company at the top of the list?
B2B Is Personal
All businesses are made up of people so marketing methods that work for consumers work for businesses, too. In fact, inbound may work better for B2B because it increases the conversion rates on complex sales and shortens the buying cycle; something “outbound” marketing can’t do.
To prove the point, here is a question for you:
What is the first thing you do when you want an answer to a problem? You most likely go to Google or some other search engine from the very start. If you do it, what makes you think others don’t? In fact, 90% of B2B buyers and influencers do the same thing.
This means if you haven’t embraced inbound marketing methods your company may not show up in Google or anywhere else. If you can’t be found, you won’t be contacted for products or services. You’ll be invisible to 90% of those you hope to sell to.
Besides, the buyers and influencers in manufacturing tend to be engineers, scientists, supply chain directors, plant managers and more. These are people, right? And they don’t like to be interrupted by marketing any more than anybody else. They want control over how they spend their time and when they talk to vendors. So don’t bug them. That would be bad.
Inbound Marketing Is Better
Inbound marketing helps your company become the first to be found through practices and methods of punching your way to the top of the search engine rankings, making you easy to find, and convincing prospects you should be a serious contender, all without cold calling, direct mailing, or buying expensive air time to blast your company name to everybody.
Especially since you would much rather spend your marketing budget on those prospects who count, wouldn’t you? With inbound you segment your ideal buyers into groups with similar interests and buying habits, create content that speaks directly to them using their own terms, and then let them come to you.
Today’s consumer, regardless of what they are shopping for, has learned to tune out most traditional marketing because it doesn’t immediately apply to their needs. Today, the buyer wants to research and then research some more, creating a short list of companies to contact before he or she ever speaks to anyone.
Why? Because speaking to a company was an invitation for a hard sales pitch before it could be determined if that company would be the right fit. All that energy would be expended for nothing.
How Does Inbound Marketing Work?
Content is at the heart of inbound marketing. As the need to solve a problem grows more intense, more research is going to be done. You need to position yourself as a primary provider of the solution using the same terms as the buyer and showing that buyer you are an expert in this field.
Search Engine Optimization
Since search engines use text to find answers to queries, you make sure you have plenty of text out there that will cause your company to be served up as one of the top answers on the first page of results. Even images and videos are found through text.
Human Optimization
Even more important is providing relevant information to those who have a pressing need to solve a problem. Besides using keywords and phrases to come up high on the search engine results page, you also want to use those terms to expand a searcher’s knowledge of what the solution might be and how you can provide it.
Complex Sales
Many B2B companies have extended sales cycles and a complex product that must pass muster with more than just the buyer. These others all require different types of information about your product or service in order to make the decision to use your company over another.
Develop a broad range of content that answers these questions and make it available to search engines and directly to those who have given permission to be marketed. The sales cycle will shorten by bringing customers into contact with your sales people when the customer is ready and much closer to buying.
Final Word
Inbound marketing is tailor made for B2B. It makes your company visible to prospects who search for business solutions the same way they search for consumer goods. It makes you into a problem solver instead of a seller. And it puts the buyer in control, just the way they like it.
An additional plus is that inbound marketing can help some of your outbound marketing work even better.
